AI will liberate our time

“Within five years robots and so-called intelligent agents will eliminate many positions in customer service, trucking and taxi services, amounting to 6 percent of jobs, according to a Forrester report.

“The bots of 2021 will be much better at understanding human language, and they will be better at learning from users and increasingly able to handle more complex scenarios. Those expanded cognitive abilities will make intelligent agents much more useful to people, and drive their widespread adoption over the next three to five years”, the reports found.”

Giving more room to AI-based services and apps can be regarded as a completely natural, even evolutionary step for mankind. This could be the beginning of a mutual learning process: machines will learn more of us and through them we will learn more about ourselves. It could be the source of many positive developments. With the coming of AI, humans can finally relax and start concentrating on what we are all better at: improving creativity instead of increasing speed; practicing empathy and communication instead of learning languages; thinking outside the box instead of studying the box for years; and AI will take care of our own secrets much better than we can. Though we need to learn how to teach them the human way before they start having second thoughts about our importance.

On the other hand, this natural step brings up certain dilemmas as well. Transportation and customer services are the main fields of personal interaction between human beings, whether it happens in a virtual or a physical place. Machines can learn how to provide excellent service, how to be polite and patient even with difficult customers, but can these learnt behaviours replace spontaneous human reactions? Being able to feel emotions and express emotions, not just learnt ones, is a special characteristic of humans. The effect of replacing humans with AI can be liberating, but how will it influence our relationships with other people? Will it help to develop our EQ or will we rather become more ignorant? and most importantly, where will the change come next? In our homes or maybe even in our bedrooms?